Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

He seems to have an open line to Pat Kenny's radio programme. Therefore, if the Minister wants to appear on RTE, I am quite sure that, as he has done so often before, Pat Kenny will give him another two, three or four hours in which to do so. He seems to have a regular slot on the show.

The Minister can threaten RTE all he likes but the fact remains that he has questions to answer. The project is ill conceived and ill thought out. We will throw away the €30 million we spent on developing the women's prison at Mountjoy as well as the many millions that were spent on improvements to the juvenile institution there.

Should this new prison be developed, the road infrastructure in the area is entirely inadequate. I represent a constituency where I deal with new developments monthly but the Government's rule on infrastructure is to build the item first, whether it be a house, factory or prison. If one marches and shouts long enough in protest a few facilities will be thrown in after ten years. Tell the people of Ashbourne about it because they have been waiting for their bypass for about 15 years. It has been promised every year for the past eight years of this Government.

Residents in the area earmarked for the new prison are right to feel concerned that their traditional homes in areas such as St. Margaret's, Kilsallaghan, Rolestown, Corrstown, and their entire way of life, will be changed forever. They will be left in the middle of a vast development site for which the infrastructure will take ten to 20 years to catch up. There is no evidence that the Minister considered any serious alternatives.

Does the Minister accept the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General who has the power to examine not just previous expenditure but the key question of value for money? The question facing us on Thornton Hall concerns the cost of what is to be forgone in Mountjoy, together with the costs that have been paid already for the site and the cost of developing the complex to the scale envisaged, including a prison hospital.

The Comptroller and Auditor General has a remit to examine value for money issues so he is an appropriate person to carry out such an examination. Two days ago a report was published by the Comptroller and Auditor General on Government overspending fiascoes. One small item in the report only merited a paragraph and concerned the €500,000 wasted on a new computer system for staff records in the prison service. In the scale of waste involved that sum did not merit much mention in the newspapers. We are now being asked to repeat that error by a possible factor of 100. I hope the Minister of State will accede to the motion.

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